AI Meeting Notes: For Cross-Language Partner Meetings, What I Check Before Sending Out the Minutes
Last month, I had a two-hour online regular meeting with a company. They discussed requirements in Chinese, our side discussed technology in English, and terminology was mixed between Chinese and English. After the meeting, the minutes needed to be sent to the group, visible to both organizations.
This is different from a team meeting: if you get a team meeting note wrong, you can correct it next time; with external minutes, one wrong sentence can take a week to fix.
So this post is not about "how to take notes," but about what I check before sending them out.
Before sending, I check six items one by one
1. Conclusions and discussions must be separated. The easiest mistake in automatic segmented summaries is writing "we are considering" as "we decided." For every sentence in the minutes that contains "confirmed" or "decided," I always go back and listen to the original audio, and only then decide whether to keep that word.
2. Terminology must be consistent throughout. The other side has its own internal set of abbreviations; for the same thing, their name differs from ours. I first fix the Chinese-English mapping—which terms must be written in which way in this meeting—run the terms through MuchSci's Paper Translation, and then check the whole document for the same concept being written in two ways.
3. Numbers, periods, and dates: always check against the source text. Quotas, delivery milestones, period lengths—I do not use numbers from the translation. This is a hard rule I set for myself, no exceptions.
4. Action items must specify the person. Who, when, and what to deliver—name each one item by item; do not write "follow up later" or "both sides will continue to maintain communication." Such phrases sound safe but in practice amount to writing nothing.
5. Attachments and minutes go together. For documents mentioned in the meeting, I use MuchSci's File Asset Library to archive them in the same directory as the minutes, saving the three rounds of back-and-forth later in the group asking "where is that file?"
6. Confidential content should be rewritten. Quotations, undisclosed technical parameters, and paragraphs the other side explicitly asks to keep confidential—I delete them directly, or write "attached separately," and do not expand on them in the group.
Three places most likely to be written wrong
Writing a question as a conclusion. Someone at the meeting asked "Can this solution support millions," and in the minutes it became "supports millions." That is very different.
Writing one thing as two. In situations with mixed Chinese and English, the same thing is first said in Chinese and then in English; when organizing, it is easy to treat them as two agenda items, and the action items end up doubled.
Writing a verbal inclination as a written commitment. "We lean toward this solution" and "we adopt this solution" differ by a signature.
My process
After the meeting, produce a first draft: use MuchSci's AI Meeting Notes to get the results of live listening and translation, automatic segmented summaries, and report generation, and use them as a draft. Then check against the six items above once or twice. After revising, use MuchSci's Office Assistant Agent to format it into an editable document, and read it through once more before sending, keeping only content both sides agree on.
There is a prerequisite to make clear here: it does not write the minutes correctly for me; it just saves me from having to type while listening. Right and wrong are still a human matter.